NEWS OF BYZANTINE STUDIES AT DUMBARTON OAKS Fall 2013 1. THE ACADEMIC YEAR 2012/13 The year 2011-­‐12 ended with the departure of a group of very young and very international fellows, who were much missed, but this departure is of course in the nature of things; we also experienced the departure of two of our teaching fellows, one to take up a prestigious position at Princeton, the other on maternity leave, and, in allied departments, the retirement of Stephen Zwirn and the move of Günder Varinlioğlu to a Koç fellowship. For a time departure seemed the norm. Soon, though, Jonathan Shea was appointed to the vacant Teaching Fellowship at George Washington University, John Hanson returned to the Museum, and Fani Gargova moved from Vienna to ICFA. But even before then the summer picked up with the arrival in June of the Greek Summer School, taught again by Alice-­‐Mary Talbot and Stratis Papaioannou. Ten students from universities at Birmingham, Indiana, Krakow, Budapest, Berkeley, Michigan, Paris, Princeton, and Yale gathered to read Greek together in the mornings, to read a special text in private tutorials, and to have extra training in palaeography and epigraphy. Ten summer fellows also gathered, a group with very broad interests, ranging from hard-­‐core philology to ceramics, and included our first fellow in sensory archaeology. Three came from Switzerland, a testimony to the strength of Byzantine Studies in a small country, others from Poland, Germany, the United States, and Italy, as well as a predoctoral resident, also from Italy. The new term brought new fellows, with a wider age-­‐range than in previous years, including Ralph-­‐Johannes Lilie in the second term after his retirement from the PMBZ. It was a joy to have two Senior Fellows in residence, one, Bob Ousterhout, for a whole year as Fellow, the other, Ioli Kalavrezou, as Dumbarton Oaks Professor in residence in the Fall. We also had more art historians than often, with Rossitza Schroeder in the first term and Beatrice Daskas and Tyler Fellow Konstantina Karterouli in both, and we held a discussion on the state and future of Byzantine art history in America. We also saw the current trend for Syriacists continue, with Alberto Rigolio in the first term and Grigory Kessel throughout the year, joining Scott Johnson, Teaching Fellow at Georgetown University. Most notably it was a year of numismatists: Rebecca Day was working on exchange between India and Byzantium, Andrei Gandila on coins and frontiers in early Byzantium, and in the second term, Julian Baker was working on fourteenth-­‐century monetary circulation, Tyler Fellow Kuba Kabala on frontier spaces using coins and seals, all joining Jonathan Shea, and on her much anticipated visits Cecile Morrisson, Advisor for Coins. Deb Brown celebrated this numismatic strength with a library rare books exhibition entitled “Ces pièces immortelles: Early Numismatic Books in the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library” at http://www.doaks.org/library-­‐
archives/library/library-­‐exhibitions/ces-­‐pieces-­‐immortelles. It was also the year in which the last Bliss Prize Fellow, Nicholas Marinides, came to us to finish his dissertation before taking up a position in Basel. Alec Luhring from Georgetown University joined us as Byzantine Studies intern, helping us restore the Byzantine 1 Studies webpages after the migration to Plone. Now that this is mostly achieved he will help us extend the range of scholarly resources available to Byzantinists and scholars in neighbouring subjects to match the current online exhibitions of coins and seals and the Syriac resources pages put together by Jack Tannous and Scott Johnson. During the year we lost Susannah Italiano to the Director’s Office as she became Events Manager; she has been very ably replaced by Amanda Daxon, our new Coordinator for Byzantine Studies. In the fall we enjoyed public lectures by Helen Evans who took us behind the scenes of her highly successful Metropolitan exhibition on Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition, and Ioli Kalavrezou on sun imagery in imperial ideology, taking her point of departure from the imperial roundel which for so many years graced the entrance hall to the old library, and now has its place in the museum with a display of imperial ideology on coins. We also hosted an experimental event, the dream-­‐clinic, to which we invited students of dreams from various disciplines: a sleep scientist from Harvard, a psycho-­‐analyst (and erstwhile Byzantinist) from London, the editor of the Byzantine dream-­‐books, the two developers of the dreams database in Athens, an expert on the logismoi of Evagrius, an anthropologist working in Central America, the author of a recent historical work on dreams and prophecy, and a philologist with interests in emotions and cognitive science. To give them pabulum for discussion (though the first afternoon opened with fireworks, and differences over Freud suggested that they never would have run out of matter for debate) we encouraged fellows and other Byzantinists to bring a dream-­‐narrative, or a dream-­‐image, for the “dream-­‐doctors” and others in the room to discuss. The rationale for this approach was the existence of a corpus of Byzantine dream-­‐books, and some work on the Byzantine dream treatises, but much confusion about dream-­‐narratives and how they may be interpreted. We were amazed at the enthusiastic response to our call, and enjoyed discussing dreams emanating from a strict ascetic world as well as erotic dreams from an intellectual milieu, and dreams from the early years of Byzantium to the last centuries. We really needed Alec Luhring’s firm and elegant timekeeping, and vowed to continue the discussions through the web-­‐
page which Alec set up for us. It is hoped at a later stage to open this beyond the immediate circle of contributors. In the spring we welcomed back Byzantine archaeologists, this time not for a conversation on the future of the subject, but for a colloquium on Byzantine Survey archaeology, organized by Sharon Gerstel and John Haldon. Given the genesis of survey methodology a majority of speakers had experience in Greece, including the Boeotia and Lakonia surveys, but we also heard about northern Syria, and Turkey, and there was a good balance between the ceramicists, the anthropologists and the post-­‐
processualists. We discussed publication but decided that in such a fast-­‐moving field print publication was not ideal. In April the Teaching Fellows organized their third day school, taking advantage of the high concentration of numismatists and sigillographers, in hopes of persuading students at George Washington, Georgetown and Catholic universities to consider working in these fields in which Dumbarton Oaks is so rich. Students were thrilled by the papers but also the tours of museum, garden, seals and coins for which we thank our colleagues. We also welcomed visits in the spring from 2 colleagues in Harvard and their classes: Ioli Kalavrezou, Dimiter Angelov and Eurydice Georganteli. This year’s Harvard exchange was between Floris Bernard, who began his career working in eleventh-­‐century poetry, but used his fellowship year to examine humor in eleventh-­‐ and twelfth-­‐century epistolography, and Daniel Donoghue, who brought us a fascinating paper on silent reading in late antiquity. We also welcomed at the end of the year John Magee from Toronto who was in DO to progress his volume for the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library; he spoke about Calcidius but also shared his experiences of medieval research centers and the relations between neighbouring fields. A stream of predoctoral and postdoctoral short-­‐term scholars, as well as fellows in other programs, and other visitors to Washington, brought us papers on Carolingian, Slavic, and Islamic topics as well as strictly Byzantine. A highlight was the lecture by Jack Tannous and Father Justin of Sinai on a ninth-­‐century Greek-­‐Arabic bilingual lectionary from the St Catherine’s New Finds. The culminating point of the year is always the symposium, and this year’s proved to be extremely popular. (One would not expect the New Testament to be a subject that might cause law-­‐abiding scholars to attempt gatecrashing, burglary and trespass.) It was organized by Derek Krueger and Robert Nelson to provide a foil for the highly successful Old Testament symposium, currently out of print. The first session took Byzantinists into a different world, that of biblical criticism, and taught us to refer to manuscripts not by their call numbers but by their Gregory-­‐Aland numbers in the Münster method of understanding the relationships among manuscripts. David Parker provided a clear introduction, Kathleen Maxwell applied the method to illustrated Greek gospel books, and Georgi Parpulov, Robert Nelson and Nadezhda Kavrus-­‐
Hoffmann brought us back into a more familiar world of scribes and scholars. Susan Harvey, Derek Krueger, and Mary Cunningham revealed literary uses of the New Testament in hymnography, hagiography, and homilies. Tia Kolbaba and Father Maximos of Simonopetra dealt with exegesis, and Stephen Shoemaker addressed the issue of the lack of response to the Apocalypse of St John in Byzantine texts. Charles Barber and Nektarios Zarras discussed ways in which the New Testament found itself on the walls of Byzantine churches. We were fortunate to have two exhibitions associated with the symposium, one in the Byzantine courtyard, “Four Byzantine Manuscripts,” the museum’s new temporary show, arranged by Gudrun Buehl, which shows off the Dumbarton Oaks New Testament manuscripts and their electronic counterparts. Another exhibition was devised for the symposium by Jonathan Shea and Lain Wilson, an online seals exhibition entitled “Leaden Gospels: Byzantine Seals and the New Testament,” http://www.doaks.org/resources/seals/leaden-­‐gospels which reveals the extraordinary richness of iconography in very small compass on these smallest of Byzantine art works. As well as a year in which the subject lines were happily crossed, and a great deal of social activity was organized in this way, it was the year of a very high achieving group of fellows; we celebrated the acquisition during the year of one doctorate, three jobs, the publication of the last volumes of the PMBZ, and the completion of at least one book manuscript; we also rejoiced at the publications of staff members. Notable among these were Scott Johnson’s Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, Joel Kalvesmaki’s book on 3 arithmology, and the volume on empires edited by Yota Batsaki and Dimiter Angelov. Scott Johnson published his translation of Jacob of Sarugh’s Homily on the Sinful Woman; and Margaret Mullett “Did Byzantium have a Court Literature?” in the proceedings of the second Sevgi Gonul symposium. It was also a stellar year for Byzantine publications: five volumes were published including the double issue 65-­‐66 of DOP. Trade and Markets, edited by Cecile Morrisson, and Viewing the Morea, edited by Sharon Gerstel, updated the symposium and colloquium series, and the Life of Ignatius, edited by Andrew Smithies and John Duffy, provided another volume in the Dumbarton Oaks Texts series of the CFHB. Three more volumes will be transmitted before Christmas. The greatest joy was reserved for Asinou across Time, a work long awaited after the Dumbarton Oaks fieldwork campaigns of the 1960s and early 1970s. We congratulate Annemarie Weyl Carr and Andreas Nicolaides for finally bringing this handsome volume to our desks, and thank the Publications Department for their inspiring and meticulous collaboration. During the year Margaret Mullett taught a class at Georgetown and addressed the DO docents, advised the Folger during their review, and helped CAORC select multi-­‐center fellows. Scott Johnson taught at the Foreign Service Institute, served on the Editorial Board for Publications of the Center for Hellenic Studies, as academic advisor to vHMML at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, on the governing Board of the Byzantine Studies Association of North America and as a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Early Christianity at Catholic University of America. Members of the team gave papers at Durham, Holy Cross, Malta, Penn, Brooklyn College, Catholic University, Salzburg, Drew University, and DO. It had been a quiet year which made possible further advances in publications, and much collaborative work, some across the programs, towards colloquia and symposia of future years and exhibitions associated with them. Outreach to the wider Byzantine community was achieved through a monthly newsletter, our Facebook page, and by the Director of Byzantine Studies’ traditional report to the Byzantine Studies Conference. 2. THE ACADEMIC YEAR 2013/14 a) The Byzantine Offices The offices of the Byzantine Studies program are located on the second floor of the Main House of Dumbarton Oaks (1703 32nd St NW). For information about any of our programs please contact the Director of Byzantine Studies, Margaret Mullett [email protected], or Program Coordinator, Amanda Daxon [email protected] To update digital resources (Gender Database, Dissertations in Progress etc) please email our intern Alec Luhring [email protected] 4 b) The Senior Fellows Dimiter Angelov (Harvard and Birmingham Universities) Albrecht Berger (Munich University) John Duffy (Harvard University)(chair 2013/14) Susan Ashbrook Harvey (Brown University) Ioli Kalavrezou (Harvard University) Robert Ousterhout (University of Pennsylvania) a) Visiting Scholars Peter Brown (November 1-­‐8) Tony Cutler (February 1-­‐28) b) Byzantine Fellows for the academic year 2013-­‐2014 Fellows Ivan Drpić, University of Washington “Art and Epigram in Byzantium, 1100–1450” Dimitris Kastritsis, University of St Andrews “Byzantines, Ottomans, and Others in the Last Century of Byzantium (1354-­‐1453)” Ekaterina Nechaeva, American Academy in Rome “Defection and Freedom: Long-­‐term Cross-­‐border Movements of Individuals in the Late Antique World” Foteini Spingou, University of Oxford “Anonymous Poems and Epigrams from ms. Marcianus gr. 524. Edition and Translation” Tolga Uyar, Orient & Méditerranée, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique “Art and Society in the Land of Rum: Thirteenth-­‐century 'Byzantine' Paintings in Cappadocia” Elena Velkova Velkovska, University of Siena “The Byzantine Liturgical Gospel between Constantinople and Jerusalem” 5 Junior Fellows Nathan Leidholm, University of Chicago “Political Families in Byzantium: The Social and Cultural Significance of the Genos as Kin Group, c.900-­‐1150” Jordan Pickett, University of Pennsylvania “Water after Antiquity: the Transformation of Roman Water Management in the Late Antique Eastern Mediterranean” AnnaLinden Weller, Rutgers University “Imagining Pre-­‐Modern Imperialism: The Letters of Byzantine Imperial Agents Outside the Metropole” William R. Tyler Fellows c)
Saskia Dirkse, Harvard University “Asceticism, Orality, and Textual Transmission in the Spiritual Meadow of John Moschus” Julian Yolles, Harvard University “Latin Culture in the Crusader States (1099-­‐1187)” Summer Fellows 2013 Maria Doerfler (Duke University), The Death of Strangers and the Life of the Community in Eastern Christian Thought Mircea Duluș (Central European University, Budapest), Philagathos of Cerami: Greek Culture, Monastic Renewal, and Politics at the Court of Roger II (1130–54) and William I (1154–66) Meaghan McEvoy (Corpus Christi College, Oxford), The Politics of Incompetence? The “Feeble” Theodosian Emperors and Why They Matter Immaculada Pérez Martín (Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Madrid), The Byzantine Reception of Michael Psellos's De omnifaria doctrina, as Shown by Its Manuscripts 6 Marka Tomic Djuric (Institute for Balkan Studies, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade), Displaying Liturgical Poetry: The Church of Marko's Monastery near Skopje Warren Woodfin (Queens College, CUNY), Byzantium and the Kipchaks: Material and Military Contacts Nektarios Zarras (University of the Aegean), Image and Narration in Byzantium: New Testament Cycles in Palaiologan Monumental Painting d) Public Lecture (in conjunction with the National Gallery of Art) To be rearranged, Sharon Gerstel (UCLA) Witnessing Byzantium: The Greek Perspective e) Informal Talks (first semester) October 2 Giedre Mickunaite (Vilnius Academy of Arts) Maniera Graeca in Europe’s Catholic East: Words and Pictures beyond Byzantium October 16 Rafah Jouejati (McGill University) Syrian Church Mosaics of the 4th and 5th Centuries: An Overview November 13 Andrew McCarthy (CAARI) Town and Country in Byzantine Cyprus: Recent Results from the Prastio Mesorotsos Archaeological Expedition November 20 Julian Yolles (Harvard University) Latin Culture in the Crusader States (1098-­‐1187) December 4 Alan Cadwallader (Australian Catholic University) Layers of Conflict in the Story of St Michael of Chonai December 11 Saskia Dirkse (Harvard University) The Unquiet Dead: The Posthumous Experience of Bodies in the Early Byzantine Religious Tales 7 f) Autumn Colloquium: November 15-­‐16, 2013 Colloquiarchs: Robert Ousterhout and Margaret Mullett Visualizing Community: City and Village in Byzantine Greece Organized to foster linkages between the exhibit “Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections” at the National Gallery of Art and the research interests and collections of Dumbarton Oaks, the colloquium echoes the companion volume to the catalog, Cities and Countryside in Byzantine Greece. With papers presented by major Greek and American Byzantinists, the colloquium addresses the many ways community was visualized: in the arts (including mosaics, frescoes, icons, and everyday objects), in architectural construction, and in settings for the ceremonies of daily life and death. Friday papers will be at the National Gallery; Saturday papers at Dumbarton Oaks. Friday (in the National Gallery) Robert Ousterhout (University of Pennsylvania), Introduction Visualizing Community in Byzantine Greece Eugenia Gerousi (Greek Archaeological Service) New Discoveries from Byzantine Greece Demetra Papanikola-­‐Bakirtzi (Leventis Municipal Museum of Nicosia, Cyprus) Earthenwares from ‘Heavenly’ Byzantium Ioli Kalavrezou (Harvard University) Art and Craftsmanship in Medieval Byzantium Saturday (in Dumbarton Oaks) Charalambos Bakirtzis (Foundation Anastasios G. Leventis) Visualizing the Byzantine City Michalis Kappas (Greek Archaeological Service, Kalamata) Architecture and Piety in Urban and Rural Peloponnese Anastasia Drandaki (Benaki Museum and Princeton) Patronage, Politics and Art in Crete on the Eve of the Council of Ferrara-­‐Florence Leonora Neville (University of Wisconsin-­‐Madison) Social Hierarchies and Social Power in Medieval Greek Villages Jonathan Shea (Dumbarton Oaks) Visualizing Urban Economies in Late Medieval Greece 8 Sarah Brooks (James Madison University) The Art of Memory. Visualizing Death in Byzantine Greece Margaret Mullett, Concluding Remarks g) Teaching Fellows’ Day: for students of Catholic, Georgetown and George Washington Universities, organized by Scott Johnson and Jonathan Shea, Byzantine Capitals outside Byzantium, TBA h) Spring Symposium: April 25-­‐27, 2014 Co-­‐symposiarchs: Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Margaret Mullett Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls: Sense Perceptions in Byzantium Byzantine culture was notably attuned to a cosmos of multiple domains: material, immaterial; bodily, intellectual, physical, spiritual; human, divine. Despite a prevailing discourse to the contrary, the Byzantine world found its bridges between domains most often in sensory modes of awareness. These different domains were concretely perceptible; further, they were encountered daily amidst the mundane no less than the exalted. Icons, incense, music, sacred architecture, ritual activity; saints, imperial families, persons at prayer; hymnography, ascetical or mystical literature: in all of its cultural expressions, the Byzantines excelled in highlighting the intersections between human and divine realms through sensory engagement (whether positive or negative). Byzantinists have been slow to look at the operations of the senses in Byzantium, especially those of seeing, its relation to the other senses, and phenomenological approaches in general. More recently work on smell and hearing has followed, and yet the areas of taste and touch—the most universal and the most necessary of the senses—are still largely uncharted. Nor has much been done to explore how Byzantines viewed the senses, or how they envisaged the sensory interactions with their world. A map of the connections between sense-­‐perceptions and other processes (of perception, memory, visualization) in the Byzantine brain has still to be sketched out. How did the Byzantines describe, narrate or represent the senses at work? It is hoped to further studies of the operations of individual senses in Byzantium in the context of all the senses, and their place in what the Byzantines thought about perception and cognition. Recent work on dreaming, on memory and on the emotions has made advances possible, and collaborative experiments between Byzantinists and neurological scientists open further approaches. The happy coincidence of a Dumbarton Oaks Garden and Landscape symposium on “Senses in the Landscape: Non-­‐Visual Experiences” and of a forthcoming exhibition at the Walters Art Museum on the five 9 senses enable some cross-­‐cultural comparisons to be made involving gardens in Islamic Spain, Hebrew hymnography, Syriac wine-­‐poetry, Mediterranean ordure, and Romanesque and Gothic precious objects—that were not just looked at but also touched, smelled, heard. Architects, musicologists, art historians, archaeologists, philologists, all can contribute approaches to the revelation of the Byzantine sensorium. Friday Introduction: Susan Ashbrook Harvey I: SOUNDS AND SILENCES Amy Papalexandrou (Austin, Texas) Toward a Sonic History of Byzantium
Kim Haines-­‐Eitzen (Cornell), Geographies of Silence in Late Antiquity
Spiro Antonopoulos (City University, London, but US) on ornamentation in music II: OLFACTORY LANDSCAPES Susan Alcock (Brown) on the smells of the street Dede Fairchild Ruggles (Urbana-­‐Champaign), Finding Scents in Islamic Gardens II: TOUCHING AND FEELING Stavroula Constantinou (Nicosia), The Saint’s Two Bodies: Sensibility under (Self-­‐)Torture in Byzantine Hagiography Saturday Ingela Nilsson (Uppsala), To Touch or not to Touch: Erotic Tactility in Byzantine Literature IV: TASTES OF LIFE Thomas Arentzen (Lund), Struggling with Romanos’s “Dagger of Taste” David Taylor (Oxford) on wine poetry 10 V: SIGHT UNSEEN Glenn Peers (Austin Texas), How Bodies Know, How We Know Bodies Martina Bagnoli (Walters), Sensing Beauty. Medieval Art, the Five Senses and the Art Museum VI: CELEBRATING THE SENSES Ruth Webb (Lille) on rhetorical senses Sunday Laura Lieber (Duke) Dancing with the Angel of Death:The Adulterous Woman of Numbers 5 Marcus Plested (Cambridge) on the spiritual senses, monastic and theological Conclusion: Margaret Mullett h) Summer Program in Byzantine Greek, directed by Alice-­‐Mary Talbot and Stratis Papioannou Dumbarton Oaks will again offer an intensive four-­‐week course in July 2014. A limited number of places will be available for students from North America and Europe. i) Opportunities and deadlines Fellowships, project grants: deadline 1 November Short-­‐term residencies and stipends: deadlines June 1 for residencies commencing September 1 or later, October 1 for residencies commencing January 1 or later; March 1 for residencies commencing June 1 or later Summer school: 15 January 2014 j) Publications Since the last BSC the following books have appeared: • DOP 65-­‐66 (2011-­‐12) 11 •
Asinou across Time: The Architecture and Murals of the Panagia Phorbiotissa, Cyprus: Annemarie Weyl Carr and Andreas Nicolaïdes (ed.) January 2013 •
Viewing the Morea: Land and People in the Late Medieval Peloponnese: Sharon E. J. Gerstel (ed.) spring 2013 •
Vita Ignatii (Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae 51, Dumbarton Oaks Texts 13): Nicetas David the Paphlagonian; Andrew Smithies (trans. and ed.) and John Duffy (comm.) spring 2013 Titles now in production • Athena Ruby Font: Dumbarton Oaks: Joel Kalvesmaki ed. • DOP 67 (2013) expected December 2013 • Taktika of Leo the Wise, revised edition, and commentary: John Haldon ed. expected fall 2013 • The Life of Basil the Younger: Stamatina McGrath, Denis Sullivan, Alice-­‐Mary Talbot trans. expected spring 2014 Titles in peer review •
North Africa under Byzantium and Early Islam, ca. 500–ca. 800, Jonathan P. Conant and Susan T. Stevens ed. expected fall 2014 •
DOP 68 expected December 2014 •
Saints and Sacred Matter: The Cult of Relics in Byzantium and Beyond, Cynthia Hahn and Holger Klein ed. expected spring 2015 •
The New Testament in Byzantium, R. S. Nelson and D. Krueger ed. expected fall 2015 •
DOP 69 expected December 2015 m) News from ICFA ICFA under its manager Shalimar Fojas White has released three finding aids related to Thomas Whittemore, one of which is the Byzantine Institute and Dumbarton Oaks collection, as well as the Underwood papers and the Der Nersessian papers, and is 12 currently working on processing the Robert Van Nice and Margaret Alexander collections. ICFA is also in the process of moving original negative film to cold storage for long-­‐term preservation. Günder Varinlioğlu curated an exhibition on Nicholas Artamonoff at the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Studies, which was accompanied by an exhibit catalog and the addition of ca. 500 images from the Freer-­‐Sackler to the online Artamonoff exhibit. ICFA published an online exhibit on Thomas Whittemore’s activities before founding the Byzantine Institute, and will release an exhibit on the Byzantine Institute moving images, which are already available online, this month. ICFA’s new online discovery system AtoM will also be released before the end of the year. n) News from the Seals Room This year has been a busy one for the Dumbarton Oaks Seals project. In the summer Eric McGeer and Jonathan Shea ran the seals half of the Dumbarton Oaks Summer program in Numismatics and Sigillography with guest appearances by Margaret Mullett and Joe Glynias. We were fortunate to have a number of excellent students studying topics as diverse as the ecclesiastical officials of the Peloponnese, the customs post at Abydos, Byzantine Sardinia, a prosopographical study of the twelfth and thirteenth century aristocracy, and the appearance of multiple family names on seals. We were also lucky to have two great interns, Lain Wilson of Princeton University and Joe Glynias of Harvard. Lain completed his work on updating and digitizing Volume 5 of the seals catalogue, while Joe catalogued over 1,000 seals with monograms and those rare seals with Arabic inscriptions. Eric and Jonathan’s cataloguing efforts were focused on seals with metrical inscriptions and the seals of judicial officials. This spring saw the launch of our new online exhibition, Leaden Gospels, a companion piece to the Spring Symposium that examined seals with depictions of New Testament scenes, as well as those showing the authors of the New Testament. o) News from the Museum The museum continued its mission to engage visitors visually and intellectually and to serve its role to foster research, interpretation and exhibition development. In the climate of creativity and new pursuits in exhibition making, the museum had an exceptional time throughout 2012/2013. The success is a testament to the vibrancy of the collections’ holdings. The museum’s Facebook page is visited by a growing community and the posted exhibitions and event announcements, news, traveling object alert, articles, and collection trivia and photos are followed enthusiastically with the most popular post seen by 2,021 people. A new online exhibition was added to the website; the pages present a complete series of Byzantine emperor coins. Further, the museum continued to work on an online database to provide access to the Byzantine coin collection following the model of the Byzantine seals online catalogue. Following the hiring of Elizabeth Williams as Research Assistant, the museum was able to form an international group of textile specialists to study and publish our Byzantine textile holding with a focus on the major group of 13 furnishing textiles. In conjunction with the Byzantine Studies Symposium on the New Testament, the exhibition “Four Byzantine Manuscripts” offered a glimpse into the world of handwritten illuminated texts of the New Testament. The four manuscripts – the Dumbarton Oaks Gospel Lectionary MS1, the Psalter and New Testament MS3, the Gospel of Luke and John MS4, and the latest acquisition, the Gospel Book MS5 – are made fully available online. The museum hosted a Study Day with specialists from various fields – text critique, art history, paleography, codicology -­‐ to collaboratively study the recently acquired Byzantine Gospel book Dumbarton Oaks MS5. In May 2013 the museum welcomed Dr. John Hanson who joined the Byzantine collection staff as Assistant Curator. p) News from the Library As announced on the BSANA listserv this summer, the Library launched a database on the DO website that allows a researcher to investigate whether DO has a microfilm of a particular manuscript in its collection. Since the microfilm project began in 2011, over 1250 of the approximately 2000 microfilm have been processed. You can find the database in the Library and Archives section of the DO website or follow the URL printed on these bookmarks. Questions about the database and the microfilm collection should be directed to the Librarian for Byzantine Studies, Deborah Brown. 14